Dancing and Body Language: why premarital sex is bad

One of my favorite activities nowadays is to swing-dance.  I was not always a skilled dancer; being Indian, the stereotype is that I have two left feet, and while I might, having taught a few Indians how at this point, protest this stereotype, in my own case it was abundantly clear.  It took me roughly two months to develop the foot coordination to learn the basic step, in point of fact, and other moves took pretty long themselves.  But before long I was doing well enough to teach the dancing, and I learned a great many things from it.  Before I went to my alma mater and learned how, I was inclined to belittle dance; it seemed to me a silly degree for young women and gay men with an inflated opinion of the importance of their own expression.  I suppose it was characteristic of the maturity one usually learns in college that I quickly had to discard this impression; dance can be beautiful, skillful, and an exultation of the beauty of the human person God made.  Moreover, it is undeniably fun, and the pretty girls I met through dancing were certainly not a detraction from learning how.  I had, before I entered, a prideful and immature opinion of the art, and now I have long since changed my tune.

I learned a great deal about more than dancing from learning how, too.  Dancing, like so many arts, is definitely a form of expression; and while we may think this only applies to interpretive dance, which is more explicitly expression, it applies, I think, in another way to social dancing.  In the interaction between leader and follower, a lot of information is exchanged: cues for moves, directions of motion, indicators of caution on crowded dancefloors.  Many of these notifications are unconscious in good dancers; in bad ones, they are either overly conscious, muted or nonexistent.  Communication is essential to dance.

One thing that one realizes after some time is that, like speech patterns, this communication has personal touches.  I can tell if someone has taken ballroom dance lessons from a number of factors.  Perhaps they exhibit hesitance towards turning by means of my right hand, or show preference for a more defined stance in more formal swing; maybe they have an insistence on ballerina turns, where the leader does not push the follower into the turn, but raises the hand, more formally, above the head and turns by means of the wrist.  Each of these things, like in poker, are "tells"; they give away information about the person that might be something they did not want to reveal.  However, it is extremely helpful to a leader to recognize them, as it shows the leader how, perhaps, he should restrain himself from or let himself go into certain moves, like aerials.

Or in another case, the circumstances of teaching can be helpful.  If someone is hesitant to learn, and male, I will sometimes (and rather casually) request that a nearby lady will come be my guinea pig to help teach the young man in question.  Now, I don't normally let this out, but the young lady is not chosen by accident.  If I see a young man standing around staring awkwardly at the dancers, I pay attention to who it is in particular who dazzles his inexperienced eyes.  Typically, just by human psychology, he stands close but not too close to wherever she is on the sidelines; he wants to ask her to dance but is restrained by his inability to do so himself.  Say what anyone may about mind-body dualism, there is usually a bodily correlate to social psychology, and I'm getting pretty good at spotting the more common ones.  I will then stroll up to him (at a different pace depending on what is required; quickly if he seems shy, or slowly and circuitously if he seems social, so as to respect his personal dignity), strike up a conversation in the same manner, and bring them around to the possibility of learning.  Then I surprise them with the girl.  Ladies: you may not realize it, but guys practically wet themselves with fear when suddenly confronted with the possibility of having to make a good showing of themselves for a girl they like in this manner.  It's a cruelty, but so is the way Petruchio "tamed" Kate, and if there's any other way, I have yet to find it; to paraphrase Petruchio, if you know a better, "'tis charity to show."

This forces them into a decision, and nine times out of ten (since I've made it clear to the girl that this is a lesson, so it's understood he doesn't know how) they'll step up to the plate.  Five minutes later, usually, they're on the floor; it's not tough when you know how to teach it.  I realize that some might think me a manipulative bastard, but this is dancing, not Lie To Me.  I'm not in the habit of interrogating people with a Tango or getting to know their deepest secrets with a waltz, it's not that sort of thing.  Like music, it communicates some circumstance (in this case, the sort of dancing experience they have) and lots of emotion; you can tell when something bad has happened to someone by the way that they waltz a little bit more tightly than normal, as though clinging to a board at sea, or when someone is feeling a bit more social than usual, by their more adventurous tendencies in swing or a tendency towards moving faster than the beat.

Personality, too, shows itself; obviously, in the way that the tendency of the follower to act like a leader signifies a certain pride or a certain attitude towards the general population of leaders (and that not always an unmerited one!)  Personality also shows itself in, for example, the way some people like to do unorthodox moves, or play around with the existing ones (which, in my opinion, should be encouraged if it won't cause an injury); it's a sort of insatiable attitude towards adventure.  The sort of dance one prefers speaks volumes, as well, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out.

Overall, it is the most obvious thing in the world to me that one can "speak" through the use of one's body and contact with another.  One thing that is also clear is that one can lie; it is the possibility inherent in speaking using anything that one can send the wrong signals.  Some who watch, for example, "So You Think You Can Dance?" or "Dancing With The Stars" are familiar with, to use an obvious case, the Argentine Tango.  This species of tango has a very simple basic step: in a straight line forward, left-beat-right-beat-left-beat-right-beat, with occasional pauses when one wishes to do a move.  This typically matches with a pulsing beat, as in for example Gotan Project's excellent Santa Maria (Del Buen Ayre):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zD9W9SZj9w

I like to joke that the basic step, while aggressively "forward", cannot sustain the dance on its own; it needs a lot of help.  By itself, it's boring.  Now, the Argentinians know this as well as anyone, which is why this step is mostly reserved for using floor space quickly; the MAIN event of the Argentinian tango is the foot action.  Through a series of bold and aggressive movements (one such move being the lady kicking up and backwards, under the crotch area, coming up just short of what I like to call the checkmate area) the leader and follower convey the feeling of being in a "passionate war", a war sustained by the lady clinging for dear life to the man, such that the entire dance becomes a legitimized form of dirty dancing, one which has more powerful expression than the ol' fashioned "club bump and grind" could ever dream of having.  This, in fact, is precisely the way Antonio Banderas' character in "Take The Lead" gets the kids interested in dance...which conjures up all sorts of moral censure in my mind.  This dance, from its very nature, is the sort of dance I wouldn't dance unless I was married for a few years already.  I know HOW, as it happens, albeit without practice; the moves are fairly primal and simplistic.  But although I know how, I will not teach it to anyone; they'd have to go elsewhere.  Nevertheless, people regularly dance this, at younger than my age, with people to whom they are not married; in fact, it's the foundation of a lot of normal tango choreography.

This, it seems to me, is a form of institutionalized lying.  As doing follows knowing and knowing follows doing, body follows soul and vice versa, dancing this way is a real act of expression; and the expression is undeniably voulez-vous coucher avec moi, not just ce soir but right now, here, on the dance floor, in front of hundreds of people.  A tribute to this fact is that moves from Argentine tango play a large role in both the Dirty Dancing movies.  There is an undeniable, always-present signal in Argentine tango.  Anyone who denies this has either never danced it or never seen it taught well.  If someone dances this without this intention, they are conveying that signal dishonestly or unknowingly (but how could it ever be unknowing?!) and thus lying about their actual intentions, and given the situation, they are probably first lying to themselves.  It's undeniably a seductive dance to try, but seduction is seductive.  For Catholics, certainly, dancing this without being married to your partner almost always represents an occasion of sin for one or both people dancing.

If, in fact, one dances this with another, trying to claim one isn't "into" them after the fact seems hypocritical, unless one has no idea what they are doing.  Thus, we see a dancer's lie.  Similarly, one may tell lies while dancing swing: one may be more daring, cling a little bit more tightly than necessary to their partner, maybe dally in a dip, gazing into her eyes a bit longer than is perhaps necessary; these things are all quite natural when dancing with a girl one likes, but only someone terribly naive would think these signals invariably honest.  I do not tell most of this, of course, to people as I teach them to dance; the more clever ones figure this out quite easily.  Part of the reason I don't tell them is because, in a way, it would be enabling them to lie; there is a certain innocence to a bad dancer, because all of their ways of conducting themselves, while primitive, are at the same time more genuine, if a bit insecure.  But I will not deny occasionally (and usually, I might add, accidentally) giving the wrong signals, as when I am angry and I perhaps have a different attitude towards life I will be more forceful and less responsive.  Sometimes one has to check oneself...belay that, often one has to check themselves.

The fact of the matter is that the general admission that dancing "expresses" should give us a real idea of what "body language" really means, that it is not just isolated to the way that girl down the bar is bearing herself towards you but in fact shows itself all the time, in almost every activity, some more so than others.  Yet there is inevitably one incredibly bodily activity which our culture, while affirming the importance of dance, wants to claim has been muzzled or never spoke at all, and that activity is sex.  Casanova slept with hundreds, maybe thousands of women, and I'll bet you that many of them were prepared to think they were the only ones in his life after he told them so.  That man knew, perniciously, how to control signals he gave in that activity, or he'd never have gone so far.  Sometimes a longtime wife, so we're informed by fiction, Shakespeare and conventional wisdom, can tell if there's something wrong, or another woman, or another such problem; to deny this would be to deny common sense.

The undeniable fact is that even in that activity (and perhaps, as the Church says, especially in that activity) bodies speak more than the most exquisitely written letter.  And sometimes one can lie just as exquisitely; lies like "it can't be bad, what we do, when it feels so good", or "you're the only one", or "we'll be together forever", or the most poignant to the act itself, "all that I am is yours, reserving nothing."  Of all these, the last is the most obvious; and all the others, some more obviously and some less, arise from that primary communication.  Atheists and anti-naturalists might try to claim that this is not by purpose, but the Catholic author writing this is certainly willing to say that the institution of marriage is the only place where sex as communication may be, so to speak, "honest"; because at most, outside of a marriage, the only testament to the claim made in sex is the word of someone who has not made explicit their never-ending devotion until death, which cannot but carry a large portion of doubt with it naturally.

Another way that one can lie in that act is with contraception, as a corollary.  If implicit in sex is the promise that one is committed to the other in every respect, that one wishes to be entirely part of the life of the other, yet one uses contraception, one imposes an artificial barrier which acquires a similar character to someone wearing running shoes at the altar.  It is to say "yes, I will give myself totally to you...but if anything results, it'll be unexpected, and I'm trying to avoid the responsibility or difficulty of dealing with it right now."

It becomes worse when the man tries to procure an abortion for the woman when such measures fail, as then the statement becomes "yes, I promised you my whole self, but that was as long as you never called on me to face the consequences of my promise."  Now, some will say that the former oversimplifies contraception, and that the latter is somehow contrary to their experience of men who sought such abortions (which is strange to me, since in these cases where the experience is contrary, usually there is an agreement between the man and the woman, in which case what is really said there is that the woman agrees never to make the man keep his promise...at which point the man may as well be both relieved and a scumbag, and the woman is lowering her standards.)  The objection to the former, though, comes from the idea that I am not somehow restraining myself from describing the reality, which can be much worse.  If a man sees a pregnancy, for example, as a difficulty and not a potential child, then one has really convinced themselves that the one whom he sleeps with is simply a sex object; the whole purpose of sex is removed, and the only remaining purpose of that communication is some sort of degraded pleasure, like telling an imprudent joke because one feels as though a lady one claims to love is "just one of the guys", and one can act as slovenly as one pleases around her because she will never judge or show any sign of calling your bluff.  If it is a woman who thinks this way, then it is as though she has lowered her standard of herself; which is why the movie Bella is so brilliant in making her most powerful objection "I can't be a mother, I'm afraid."  A woman, by allowing such folly, cheapens herself to a sex object, and loses the basis of sexual expression.

And THIS is at the same time the greatest exultation of sex and the greatest condemnation of our culture: it is only in sex that one is able to express (literally!) not only an idea, not only an emotion, not only a political sea change or grand gesture, but a person, the most complex and beautiful thing in existence.  In this, we are made like the Trinity, because the fecundity of created things, as Thomas says, imitates the perfect fecundity of the Father expressed in the procedure of the Word.  We make another like ourselves.  If this is difficult to understand, it's important to look into the character of expression itself.  An expression is an expression of what is expressed; what is expressed is something of the thing expressing; and when an expression is not correspondent to the thing, we call it false.  When I speak, for example, "I am writing a blog post", I am expressing my action which is something present, first, to my senses, and following this, to my mind, by which I am able, unlike other sorts of animals, to communicate.  If I were to say "I am drinking water", that would be false, because I am doing no such thing.  As shown above, one can convey information about everything from emotion to personality in dance; but the second one is aware of this, one may lie through the same means.  In sex, one can convey most intimately the giving-over of the whole self; but without the possibility sex has of fecundity, it loses something major in signification; what is left is just idle play, pleasurable though it may be.  In the use of contraception, one is left with an act which keeps the other person at arm's length while at the same time pretending to pull them close.  In abortion, one actively pushes the other person away.  In premarital sex, one pulls the other close, but refuses to give any pledge that they will not abuse that power by then giving themselves to another, or sending the wrong signal.  Or perhaps premarital sex simply signifies what many women already know it does: that the man's too immature to know that his actions have results of which he is unaware.

This is as much, I will say, as has been explored in the beautiful, brilliant, and prescient work of John Paul II, his Theology of the Body.  The connection to dance, I will say, is my own, but everything I have said here is contained implicitly, and at times more clearly, in what the Holy Father observed.